Q. We're going to spend the rest of our time
together exploring your reasons for that opinion. What do you
understand intelligent design to be?

A. I understand it to be a reformulation of an old
theological argument for the existence of God, an argument that
unfolds in the form of a syllogism, the major premise of which is
wherever there is complex design, there has to be some
intelligent designer. The minor premise is that nature exhibits
complex design. The conclusion, therefore, nature must have an
intelligent designer.

Q. You said this is an old tradition. Can you
trace the antecedence for us?

A. Well, two landmarks are Thomas Aquinas and
William Paley.
Thomas Aquinas was a famous theologian/philosopher
who lived in the 13th Century. And one of his claims to fame is
that he formulated what are called the five ways to prove the
existence of God, one of which was to argue from the design and
complexity and order and pattern in the universe to the existence
of an ultimate intelligent designer. The second landmark --
incidentally, Thomas Aquinas ended every one of his five
arguments by saying that this being, this ultimate, everyone
understands to be God.

And
William Paley,
in the late 18th and early 19th
Century, is famous for formulating the famous watchmaker
argument, according to which, just as you open up a watch and
find there intricate design and that should lead you to postulate
the existence of a watchmaker, so also the intricate design and
pattern in nature should lead one to posit the existence of an
intelligent being that's responsible for the existence of design
and pattern in nature.

And like Aquinas, William Paley also said to the
effect that everyone understands this to be the God of biblical
theism, the creator God of biblical religion.

Q. How does intelligent design build upon or
modernize this old tradition of natural theology?

A. Well, it simply appeals to more recent findings
about the complexity of the world by contemporary science, for
example, what are called irreducible complexity and specified
informational complexity.

The
irreducible complexity idea that the
intelligent design proponents, especially Michael Behe, use
refers to the subcellular intricacy that's been made available by
the electron microscope since the 1950s and also such things as
blood clotting mechanisms, immune systems, and so forth.

And then more recently
William Dembski,
especially, has talked about how the
specified informational
complexity in the DNA at the nucleus of cells consists of a
specific sequence of nucleotides which form a recipe or a
template for the design of the organism as a whole.

Q. It may be possible, if you drop that microphone
down a bit, that the "P" sound won't be as pronounced here. With
us?

Does intelligent design identify the designer as
God?

A. Intelligent design proponents stop short of
identifying the intelligent designer as God, but I would say that
the structure and history of Western thought, especially
religious thought as such, that most readers, if not all, will
immediately identify this intelligent agent with the deity of
theistic that is biblically-based religion.

Q. Does intelligent design resemble creation
science from the 1960s and 1970s in America?

A. Well, both creation science and intelligent
design argue that the intelligence that runs the universe, that
guides the universe, is something that has to be brought down to
the level of scientific explanation.

They both deny that natural causes alone can bring
about the complexity of life, so what they share is the tendency
to bring into scientific discourse a category which I don't think
belongs there, namely intelligent design, to make up for what
seems impossible for nature to bring about by itself.

And they also share the idea of what's called
"special creation," according to which the intelligent designer
or the creator intervenes from time to time to bring about
specifically new and distinct species of life, which could not
have come about for them by common descent but had to be created
individually by ad hoc acts of the deity.

Q. At Page 85 -- this is P11, Your Honor, Exhibit
P11. At Page 85, Pandas and People is talking about an analogy
drawn on the structure of DNA and says, "This strong analogy
leads to the conclusion that life itself owes its origin to a
master intellect."

Is that consistent with the explanation you've
just been giving about --

Q. And you reference the concept of special
creation. Starting at Page 99 and going over to Page 100, the
text of Pandas and People says, quote, Intelligent design means
that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent
agency with their distinctive features already in tact: fish with
fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, et
cetera. Is that an example of special creation?

A. Intelligent design stops short of explicitly
identifying the intelligent designer with the Creator. And also,
in my opinion, in my reading of intelligent design works, I would
say that on the average, they are less biblically literalists in
their interpretation of Scripture than those who call themselves
creation scientists. But substantively they're very much the
same.

Q. I'd like to shift gears, and we've talked about
intelligent design. Now let's talk about what makes the subject
religion or religious.

In your report that you've submitted here, you
identified three characteristics or qualities where you equate
with religion or religious. The first of those is a devotion to
an ultimate in importance and explanatory power. Could you tell
us what you mean by that?

A. Well, there are different levels of
explanation. Science, I believe, works with near at hand,
available, observable natural explanations, but the human mind
also looks for ultimate explanations. And it's at the level of
ultimate explanations that the -- what we call theological
discourse is appropriately located.

Q. Pandas -- we referred just a minute ago to a
quote from Pandas where it refers to a master intellect. Is that
consistent with this notion of ultimate?

A. Yes. Clearly the notion of a master intellect,
which assumes that we can't go any further than the master
intellect, fits in the category of ultimate explanation, as well
as ultimate in the order of being.

Q. I'd like to quote again from Pandas, Page 6.
Quote, In the world around us, we see two classes of things,
natural objects like rivers and mountains and manmade structures
like houses and computers. To put it in the context of origins,
we see things resulting from two kinds of causes, natural and
intelligent.

Does this shed light on whether Pandas is
religious in the sense we've just been talking about?

A. Yes, it does. If there are only two kinds of
causes, natural causes and intelligent causes, then that implies
logically that intelligent causes are not natural causes. And I
don't know where else one would logically locate the intelligent
causes except in the space of an ultimate explanation.

Q. Another of your definitions of "religious" is
as a reference to a mystery that unfolds the ordinary world but
is not fully accessible to the senses of those of us in that
ordinary world.

Does Pandas reveal whether intelligent design is
religious in that second sense, as well?

A. If I could refer to a quotation here. The
authors of Pandas and People ask this question: "What kind of
intelligent agent was it?" And then it goes on to say, the book
goes on to say, "On its own, science cannot answer this question.
It must leave it to religion and philosophy."

So that would lead one to conclude that only a
religious explanation is going to give a complete explanation of
life.

MR. WILCOX: For the record, Your Honor, that quote
was from Page 7 of P11.

Q. A third definition of religion you articulate
in your report is Western cultural theism or a belief in a God
who is good, powerful, and intelligent. At the risk of belaboring
the point, does Pandas shed any light on whether intelligent
design meets this definition of religion?

A. Yes. The very idea of intelligence implies that
it resides somehow within a being that is at least personal. And
in the case of theistic religion, God is seen as personal, so
it's just automatic and logical that one would identify this
intelligent agent with the personal God, creator God,
transcendent God, all good, all beneficent God of Christian and
biblical theism.

Q. For intelligent design to be coherent or
intelligible, does it require a particular religious
world-view?

A. In my view, the way in which intelligent design
is used in the discourse that's in dispute, it does entail an
essentially biblical and specifically Christian view of the world
and an ultimate intelligence, ultimate reality.

Q. Do you have any information as to whether the
leading proponents of intelligent design are themselves deeply
Christian?

A. In my experience -- and I've read quite a few
of them -- I see no exceptions to what I take to be the fact that
all of them are deeply religious people, deeply committed to the
cause of the survival of Western theism, and I see this as one of
the motivating factors behind the whole movement.

Q. Has your study of intelligent design acquainted
you with the motivations of its leading proponents?

A. Well, I've observed that, again, without
exception, their objective seems to me to get at the heart of
what they consider to be the source of moral and spiritual decay.
And they do this by using a strategic tool or what they call a
Wedge to combat the materialistic world-view which they consider
to be inextricably connected to a Darwinian way of looking at
life or, more generally, to an evolutionary biological way of
looking at life.

Q. And by a materialist world-view or belief
system, what does that mean?

A. Materialism is a belief system that claims that
matter, lifeless and mindless matter, is the ultimate foundation
of all reality, and there's nothing more ultimate than that. So
it's kind of religious in the first sense of my term, a belief in
something of ultimate importance.

For the materialist, matter is the ultimate
creator, the ultimate source of all being, and therefore it
excludes the existence of anything supernatural, certainly the
existence of God.

MR. THOMPSON: Objection, Your Honor. He is not a
scientist, nor is he a philosopher of science, nor is he a
historian of science. And we are now getting into the field of
Professor Haught telling us what's science. His only purpose here
was to talk about religion and its impact on the intelligent
design theory.

THE COURT: Are you saying it's outside of the four
corners of his report?

THE COURT: Well, that's what the objection has to
be, I think. And if it's within his report and you had notice and
you stipulated as to his credentials, then I think he's going to
be able to testify to it. Now, if you want to look at it, I'll
give you a moment to do that.

THE COURT: I don't want to do it under duress, so
let's take a moment and have you take a look and see if you want
to base an objection on the report. And if there is an objection,
I'm going to need a copy of the report or be pointed to the
exhibit number so that I have it.

MR. THOMPSON: I saw a comment about science, Your
Honor, on the report, so I'll withdraw my objection.

THE COURT: You certainly have an objection if it
goes beyond that. Then I'll consider the objection with regard to
that extent.

A. Science is a mode of inquiry that looks to
understand natural phenomena by looking for their natural causes,
efficient and material causes. It does this by first gathering
data observationally or empirically. Then it organizes this data
into the form of hypotheses or theories. And then, thirdly, it
continually tests the authenticity of these hypotheses and
theories against new data that might come in and perhaps
occasionally bring about the revision of the hypothesis or
theory.

Q. You said that science seeks to understand the
natural world through natural explanations. Is that
important?

A. Yes, that's critical. The science, by
definition, limits itself self-consciously, methodologically, to
natural explanations. And that means that anything like a
supernatural reality or transcendent reality, science is simply
not wired to pick up any signals of it, and therefore any
reference to the supernatural simply cannot be part of scientific
discourse. And this is the way that science carries on to our
present day.

A. Modern science we date from roughly the end of
the 16th to the 17th Century, in that period of time. And it was
at that time that the great figurists of modern science, almost
all of whom were deeply religious men themselves, decided
self-consciously that this new mode of inquiry would not appeal
to anything that's not natural, would not appeal to things like
value, importance, divine causation, or even anything like
intelligent causation.

These are not scientific categories of
explanation. And ever since the 16th and 17th Century, modern
science, as it's called, leaves out anything that has to do with
theological or ultimate explanation.

Q. Who are some of the leading figures in the
development of modern science?

A. Well, we can go back to Copernicus. And, of
course, the figure that for me stands out is Galileo. And Galileo
is important because
he told his accusers, his ecclesiastical
accusers, that we should never look for scientific information in
Scripture, we should never look for scientific information in any
theological source.

So he placed science on the foundation of
experience rather than authority or philosophical coherence. From
thence forth to this day, science is a discipline where
testability is the criterion of its worth.

A. By no means. Science and religion, as I've
written in all of my books, are dealing with two completely
different or distinct realms. They can be related, science and
religion, but, first of all, they have to be distinguished. The
medieval philosopher said, we distinguish in order to relate. And
when we have a failure to distinguish science from religion, then
confusion will follow.

So science deals with questions relating to
natural causes, to efficient and material causes, if you want to
use Aristotelian language. Religion and theology deal with
questions about ultimate meaning and ultimate purpose. To put it
very simply, science deals with causes, religion deals with
meanings. Science asks "how" questions, religion asks "why"
questions.

And it's because they're doing different things
that they cannot logically stand in a competitive relationship
with each other any more than, say, a baseball game or a baseball
player or a good move in baseball can conflict with a good move
in chess. They're different games, if you want to use that
analogy, playing by different rules.

Q. You've used another analogy in discussions with
me that might be illuminating. This is the boiling water analogy.
Could you give us that?

A. Yes. I think most of the issues in science and
religion discussions, most of the confusion that occurs happens
because we fail to distinguish different levels of explanation.
And so what I advocate is layered or -- layered explanation or
explanatory pluralism, according to which almost every phenomenon
in our experience can be explained at a plurality of levels.

And a simple example would be a teapot. Suppose a
teapot is boiling on your stove and someone comes into the room
and says, explain to me why that's boiling. Well, one explanation
would be it's boiling because the water molecules are moving
around excitedly and the liquid state is being transformed into
gas.

But at the same time you could just as easily have
answered that question by saying, it's boiling because my wife
turned the gas on. Or you could also answer that same question by
saying it's boiling because I want tea.

All three answers are right, but they don't
conflict with each other because they're working at different
levels. Science works at one level of investigation, religion at
another. And it would be a mistake to say that the teapot is
boiling because I turned the gas on rather than because the
molecules are moving around. It would be a mistake to say the
teapot is boiling because of molecular movement rather than
because I want tea. No, you can have a plurality of levels of
explanation. But the problems occur when one assumes that there's
only one level.

And if I could apply this analogy to the present
case, it seems to me that the intelligent design proponents are
assuming that there's only one authoritative level of inquiry,
namely the scientific, which is, of course, a very authoritative
way of looking at things. And they're trying to ram their
ultimate kind of explanation, intelligent design, into that level
of explanation, which is culturally very authoritative today,
namely the scientific.

And for that reason, science, scientists
justifiably object because implicitly they're accepting what I'm
calling this explanatory pluralism or layered explanation where
you don't bring in "I want tea" while you're studying the
molecular movement in the kettle. So it's a logical confusion
that we have going here.

Q. I think you may have already explained this,
but just to be sure we see how it connects, one hears it said
that it's important to, quote, teach the controversy, unquote. Do
you agree with that?

A. Well, there really is no controversy between
evolutionary biology and intelligent design because intelligent
design simply is not a scientific idea. To come back to my
analogy, it simply doesn't fall on the same level of inquiry.

But if there is a controversy at all, it's a
controversy between two groups of people, scientists who rightly
demand that intelligent design be excluded from scientific
inquiry and intelligent design proponents who want it to be part
of scientific inquiry.

And I also think that it's certainly appropriate
in high school classes or wherever for people to talk about the
controversy. To talk about what's going on at this trial, for
example, would be a good topic for a civics class or a social
science class or a cultural history class or something like
that.

But certainly there is no controversy, logically
speaking, between intelligent design and evolutionary biology
because intelligent design, just to repeat, is simply not a
scientific idea.

Q. Does that mean intelligent design doesn't
belong in a biology class?

Q. In your report, you refer to the logical and
rhetorical respect in which intelligent design is revealed as
religious. Could you --

A. Yes. By "rhetorical," I mean persuasive. I
think what I see happening is intelligent design proponents are
trying to persuade students and the public that intelligent
design is something that should be part of scientific
discourse.

But rhetoric is not necessarily logical, and the
whole foundation of that rhetoric is a logical confusion or alloy
of proximate explanations with ultimate explanations, and that's
what makes the rhetoric suspicious.

Q. You've said several times that you regard
intelligent design as being religious or rooted in religion. Is
intelligent design reflective of any particular religion?

A. I see it, at least as it's being used in this
discussion, as reflective of the old natural theology tradition
of classic Christianity with its postulation of an ultimate
transcendent, all good, beneficent, all powerful creator God.

Q. You have called intelligent design appalling
theology. Can you explain that?

A. Well, I think most people will instinctively
identify the intelligent designer with the God of theism, but all
the great theologians -- there are theologians that I consider
great, people like
Karl Barth,
Paul Tillich,
Langdon Gilkey,
Karl Rahner
-- would see what's going on in the intelligent design
proposal, from a theological point of view, is the attempt to
bring the ultimate and the infinite down in a belittling way into
the continuum of natural causes as one finite cause among
others.

And anytime, from a theological point of view, you
try to have the infinite become squeezed into the category of the
finite, that's known as idolatry. So it's religiously, as well as
theologically, offensive to what I consider the best theologians,
for example, of the 20th Century.

Q. These theologians you've just named, are they
Catholic theologians like yourself?

A. Karl Barth is probably the most important
Protestant theologian of the 20th Century. Paul Tillich is a
close second or third. Karl Rahner is the most important Catholic
theologian of the 20th Century. Langdon Gilkey, who taught at
Georgetown with me,
testified in the Arkansas creation trial in a
way very similar to the ideas that I'm expressing here.

A. Yes. In 1996, he wrote a
statement, an
authoritative statement, saying that the Catholic thought is by
no means opposed to evolutionary science. Indeed, he says that it
seems now that the evidence for evolution is quite convincing,
that evolution is more than a hypothesis, it's more than a guess.
It's based in sound scientific research.

He only cautioned that we should not associate the
philosophy of materialism, which I was talking about earlier,
with evolutionary science, we should keep them distinct, which
is, of course, from my point of view theologically, very, very
sound advice.

A. No, materialism is a belief system, no less a
belief system than is intelligent design. And as such, it has
absolutely no place in the classroom, and teachers of evolution
should not lead their students craftily or explicitly to have to
embrace -- to feel that they have to embrace a materialistic
world-view in order to make sense of evolution.

Evolutionary science can be disengaged from
ideologies of all sorts, and that's the way evolution should be
taught. So materialism, to answer your question, has absolutely
no place in the classroom.

Q. You concluded your report with an observation
that if a child of yours were attending a school where the
teachers or administrators propose that students should consider
intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, you would be
offended religiously, as well as intellectually. Could you
explain that?

A. Yes. Let me talk first about intellectually.
What I mean by that is that I would want a child of mine, in a
science class, to really feel and experience the adventure of
open-ended scientific discovery, the sense that there's an
exhilarating horizon of new discovery up ahead and that the world
is open to endless and indefinite scientific scrutiny and
inquiry. I think that adventure is extremely important
educationally, pedagogically.

But the moment you bring in a category like
intelligent design into scientific discourse, it functions, it
seems to me, as a science stopper. In a sense, it can give the
child the impression, student the impression, that, well, why
should I bother exploring in detail what's going on in life if
it's all going to come down to an intelligent designer did it? So
it kind of suppresses, it suffocates, I think, the scientific
spirit intellectually.

Theologically, I think it's inevitable that a
student or certainly a child of mine -- and I think this is true
of most students in our culture -- when they hear this term
"master intelligence" or "intelligent designer" are instinctively
going to identify this with the God of their religious
education.

But, again, from a theological point of view, to
me, this is way too small a God, at least as far as the religious
education of my children would be concerned. The God of
intelligent design seems to be -- or gives the impression to a
religiously sensitive kid or student of being a kind of tinkerer
or meddler who makes ad hoc adjustments to the creation, whereas
what I would want a child of mine to think of when he or she
thinks of God is something much more generous, much more
expansive, a God who can make a universe which is, from the
start, resourceful enough to unfold from within itself in a
natural way all the extravagant beauty and evolutionary diversity
that, in fact, has happened.

To put it very simply, a God who is able to make a
universe that can somehow make itself is much more impressive
religiously than a God who has to keep tinkering with the
creation. So both intellectually and religiously I find it
extremely problematic, intelligent design.

A. Evolution, as a scientific idea, is something
that's relatively recent. Evolution as a fact goes back 13.7
billion years.

Q. I'm talking about people 1500 years ago that
were postulating evolution as a means that life could have
evolved.

A. If it was that long ago, it could not possibly
have been a scientific idea. There were ancient philosophers like
Heroclides, for example, who complained that things are
constantly in motion. And if you want to call evolution that,
then yes, but it's not a scientific idea.

A. St. Augustine had the idea that the universe
has been seeded with what he called seminis ratsio nales,
rational principles, that over the course of time can unfold very
much in the way of the more generous theology that I was talking
about at the end of my testimony.

Q. So merely because you trace a particular idea
to antiquity or to old tradition does not in and of itself make
that idea invalid, does it?

A. Well, if it's science that you're talking
about, then we have to go back to the 17th Century and look at
the methods that science was using and that scientists still use.
And that's really what's distinctive about contemporary
evolutionary theory, that it employs a scientific method which
Augustine did not have.

Q. Please listen to my question. I didn't talk
about scientific theory, I talked about an idea. Now respond to
it with reference to an idea rather than a scientific theory.

MR. WILCOX: Request that it be restated in its
entirety then, Your Honor, the court reporter, please.

THE WITNESS: No, but one has to be careful of
what's called
genetic fallacy in logic. That's the fallacy that
tries to understand any phenomenon in terms of how it
originated.

For example, you could say that astronomy
originated in astrology and that chemistry originated in alchemy.
But you can't evaluate, you can't reduce the present
understanding of chemistry, for example, to what the alchemists
were talking about.

Q. And when you talk about genetic fallacy, it
would be a fallacy to claim -- a genetic fallacy to claim that a
particular theory is invalid because it comes from a particular
religious person. Isn't that correct?

Q. Now, would you agree with this statement: It is
not helpful, however, simply to dismiss intelligent design
theory, IDT, as a product of ignorance mixed with narrow
religious biases? Would you agree with that statement?

Q. Okay. Could you just give me your view of what
it entails? What is Darwin's Black Box about?

A. It's an attempt to argue that Darwin's theory
depends upon gradual step-by-step change over time and that
certain biochemical phenomena, subcellular mechanisms, could not
have been selected evolutionarily unless they had already been
cobbled together or put together so that all the parts are
working simultaneously and in harmony and therefore could not
have come about by Darwinian evolutionary processes. That's the
fundamental thesis of the book.

Q. Do you agree that Professor Behe discusses the
theory of intelligent design and his concept of irreducibly --
irreducible complexity utilizing scientific empirical
evidence?

A. Empirical data that he has picked up as a
scientist, as a biochemist, certainly is the material that he's
trying to organize by way of the hypothesis of intelligent
design. That doesn't mean it's scientific, but that's what he's
doing.

Q. Well, he has postulated a theory, is that
correct, irreducible complexity?

A. I'm not sure whether he calls that a theory or
just an idea. It's part of a component of his theory.

Q. Okay. A component. Now, I think you touched on
a good point. Data is different than evidence, is it not?

A. Evidence and data, in the thinking of most
scientists, I don't think there's -- there's a difference between
hypothesis and data, yes.

Q. And as a result of the observations that he
sees, he concludes that they are irreducibly complex. Is that
correct?

A. Whether the data are sufficient of themselves
to lead him to that notion of irreducible complexity or whether,
perhaps, some a priori patterns of thought have also come to meet
that data, that's a question in my mind, anyway.

Q. Well, please then give me your understanding of
what you believe Michael Behe means by the phrase "irreducible
complexity."

A. Irreducible complexity refers to any complex
entity which is composed of a number of components, the absence
of any one of which would have made that entity dysfunctional
and, from a point of view of evolutionary thinking, unable to be
selected by nature for survival.

Q. And his conclusions contradict Darwin's
explanation of complex systems having developed through natural
selection. Is that correct?

A. The contradiction does not lie in observation,
observation of the data, but in the different levels of
explanation at which Darwin and Michael Behe are working.

If I could use the example of the three levels. I
think when Behe introduces his notion of irreducible complexity
and interprets that as the product of intelligent design, he's
working at a different level of inquiry from that of which Darwin
and other scientists were.

Q. Maybe you are familiar with this particular
paragraph that Darwin wrote in Origin of Species, and I quote, If
it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which
could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight
modifications, my theory would absolutely down, end of
quote. Had you ever heard that challenge?

The defense lawyer quotes
chapter 6 of The Origins of
Species as saying, "If
it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which
could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight
modifications, my theory would absolutely down." But he does not quote
the next sentence, "But I can find out no such case."

A. Yes, I have. And Michael Behe quotes that in
every speech he gives.

Q. And so Michael Behe's experiments are directly
addressing that particular challenge that was levied by Charles
Darwin. Correct?

A. Well, I pointed out earlier, when I was asked
about do I consider this a controversy, that I don't consider the
notion of intelligent design, which is the ultimate explanatory
category that Behe appeals to, to be a category within which you
can have a real controversy, so no, it's not a controversy.

Q. Well, what I'm talking about is the complexity
of the -- let's say the bacteria flagellum which Michael Behe
says is irreducibly complex versus other scientists who say it is
not irreducibly complex. That's a scientific controversy.
Correct?

Q. In fact, many of the great theories we have
today started out as minority theories. Isn't that correct?

A. If they were scientific theories to begin with,
then they had some chance of survival. If they're not scientific
theories to begin with, then they don't have any chance in
principle of survival in scientific discourse.

Q. Well, I didn't ask about the survival of
theories, but I said many scientific theories that we hold today
started out as minority positions. Isn't that correct?

A. Yes. And I take the side of Miller there.
Incidentally, if I could just comment, it's not just a matter of
evolution or intelligent design involved in bringing about
complexity, there are also physical processes which are not often
mentioned in this discussion, such as the self-organizing
properties of matter itself that we are just now discovering
scientifically, and they could be a major factor in bringing
about what Behe calls irreducible complexity in a purely natural
way.

A. These are called
autopoietic, to be more
precise. That is, they're self-making processes. But all of the
-- or many of the concepts we use in science are metaphorical.
The criterion is not the word, the language, but the
measurability of what's going on.

A. No. It's simply that we're finding out things
that we didn't know scientifically centuries ago or even early in
the 20th Century, that matter, that matter is much more
resourceful and much more spontaneously self-organizing than we
had ever thought, because we had had a wrong impression of what
matter is going back to the beginning of the modern age.

Q. Well, could it be that this theory of
self-organizing will ultimately lead to a discovery that actually
matter does have some sort of intelligence?

A. That certainly won't be a scientific idea,
because, as I said earlier, the category of intelligence is
simply not part of the explanatory arsenal of scientific
discourse.

Q. Well, science has not explored and explained
everything in the universe, has it?

A. Intelligence is related to the complexification
of the central nervous system of primates and humans. It's not
something that you attribute to individual monads, individual
atoms or molecules. It requires a complex patterning in order for
it to emerge as an emergent property of nature.

Q. By the way, you referred to some pages of
Pandas and People. How many pages did you read?

A. I have no idea. I have perused the whole book,
but I only read selectively from passages that I think had
relevance to this particular case.

Q. I want to go to a couple of comments you made
about the creationism versus intelligent design theory. Isn't it
true that a creationist is a term used to describe individuals
who would interpret creation stories using the Bible in its
literary sense?

Q. And creationism is an interpretation of nature
which takes the biblical narrative of creation and the sequence
of days involved in the creation story corresponding to the Bible
literally and factually and then come to conclusions based upon
their view of the facts in the creation story. That's pretty
compound.

Q. You basically, early on -- I don't want to test
your memory. I'll show you the deposition. But early on one of
the first things you said was you disagreed with Barbara Forrest
and Pennock as to the way they tied together creationism and
intelligent design?

A. Yes, from the point of view of strict logical
precision, because not all intelligent design proponents are
biblically literalists. I would want to make them distinct from
creationists logically speaking. But as far as the substance of
this trial is concerned, there is really no major difference.

Q. Well, I'm asking the questions not just focused
on this trial, but focused on the outside world as to what
creationism is and what intelligent design is. Okay?

Q. Let me read to you and ask you if this is your
testimony today. And I quote from Deeper Than Darwin, Page 125.
"The only book on his list to which Cruze gives unqualified
approval is Robert Pennock's Tower of Babel, an important
critique of anti-Darwinism, but one that I believe misleadingly
conflates creationism with intelligent design theory, even though
Cruze himself acknowledges that IDT defenders like William
Dembski and Michael Behe are not Bible literalists."

Q. Okay. So it is wrong for the Court to get an
impression that creationism and intelligent design are the same
thing?

A. They're not exactly the same thing, but on the
issues that really matter, they both, as I said earlier, are
trying to bring an ultimate explanation into the category of
proximate explanations. So substantively, they are identical as
far as what is really important in this particular case.

Q. In fact, in your deposition, you specifically
stated that you would have emphasized the differences between
creationism and intelligent design more so than -- when you were
comparing Pennock's and Forrest's view, did you not?

Q. Isn't it true that this great dispute over the
theory of intelligent design -- that despite this great dispute
over intelligent design, Darwinians are postulating matter that
has a mind of its own? Isn't that true?

A. Sometimes their materialist way of looking at
things leads them to that way of expression.

Q. And my next question is, you just think that
this is a literary license that they take to use human
characteristics?

A. Yes. If you press any one of them, they would
say that they don't mean it literally.

Q. Let me read from your book
Deeper Than Darwin,
Page 115. Quote, If we could be assured that the idea of genes
striving to survive was simply a convenient way of speaking and
one not to be taken too literally, then we might have reason to
be less concerned about this dramatic displacement. However, the
new Darwinian projection of subjectivity into our genes is more
than an innocent literary device, end quote. Is that what you
wrote in your book?

A. Yes, but at that point I wasn't talking about
Darwinism, I was talking about certain materialists'
interpretations of Darwinism. The point of that whole book, just
to put it in context, is to criticize not evolution and not
neo-Darwinism, not Darwinism, but materialists' interpretations
of Darwinism.

Q. Well, materialists are Darwinians. Right?
They're a group of Darwinians?

A. But Darwinism in no way logically entails
materialism. This is just by accident that some materialists are
Darwinians and vice versa.

Q. In fact, you go to great lengths to take
Darwinists to task because they are materialists, do you not?

Q. Let me quote from your book, Page 116, and ask
you if this is still a true statement. Quote, It is a mix of
cooperation and competition among striving and achieving genes
that, accordingly to Ridley, accounts for the evolutionary
invention of gender-based behavior. Sex, he says, is the outcome
of genes devising strategies to avoid their demise at the hand of
parasites, end quote. Doesn't that sound like intelligence, as
well?

A. Again, Ridley, especially, would want to make
it clear that he is not taking the striving as something that's
literal. However, I think there's a way in which Ridley has
himself at times conflated Darwinian ideas with materialist
ideas, and that's what I'm criticizing, not the Darwinism, but
the materialist overtones or connotations of his modes of
expression.

Q. Well, I understand you're taking not only
intelligent design to task, but you're also taking a lot of
Darwinians to task who have sort of gotten into the metaphysical
world. Isn't that true?

Q. Okay. And in another section in your book, Page
3, and I'm quoting again, quote -- this is you writing again --
But enlightened evolutionists caution us that religion and art
are merely heart-warming fiction. Our genes, they claim, have
created adaptive but essentially deceptive brains and emotions
that spin seductive spiritual visions in order to make us think
we are loved and cared for. But, in fact, it is all illusion.
Darwin has allowed us at last to naturalize religion completely.
You wrote that. Correct?

A. That's not my position. I'm describing the
position of materialist Darwinians.

Q. Correct, yes. And so again we have this idea
that these genes are somehow creating -- with their deceptive
brains are creating spiritual visions?

A. What the materialist Darwinians have to do,
since they deny the existence of God, is to come back to the only
kind of explanation that's available to them, and that's a
Darwinian explanation. So that's another example of what I call
refusal to accept layered explanation.

They, like the intelligent design people, share in
common the conviction that there's only one explanatory slot
available. So if intelligent design doesn't fit it, then material
processes do and vice versa. But I object to both approaches as
not being layered in their understanding of things.

Q. So according to many prominent Darwinists, the
philosophical message of Darwinism can't be disengaged from
Darwin's science. Isn't that true?

Q. Okay. And he has made that statement, that one
can't disengage Darwinism --

A. He hasn't put it in those explicit terms, but
he as implied that Darwin comes along with a philosophical
message of materialism. And that's why I object to Gould's whole
approach, because he conflates science with ideology too much.
Not always.

Q. So there is really a significant group of
Darwinian scientists who are actually getting into the physical
-- excuse me, the metaphysical world. Correct?

Q. Now, do you remember this famous phrase by
Darwin in the last paragraph of his Origin of Species: There is
grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been
originally breathed by the Creator, capital C, by the Creator
into a few forms or into one? Have you ever heard that?

A. I have, and I've also heard historians say that
later Darwin sincerely regretted that last paragraph.

Q. Well, if that was in his original volume,
Origin of Species, and he mentioned the Creator with a capital C
and actually postulated that the original form of life was
breathed into by the Creator, would that keep the origin of
Darwin -- Darwin's Origin of Species outside the science
classroom?

A. Darwin would never have understood that last
paragraph as a scientific statement. So what's at issue is what
is truly scientific and what is not. And a good science class
will help students distinguish between what is ideology, what is
belief, and what is scientific method.

Q. Well, the students that get Darwin's Origin of
Species aren't going to be able to talk to Darwin. So with that
language in Darwin's Origin of Species referring to the Creator,
would that cause you to advocate removal of the Origin of Species
from the classroom?

A. No. In fact, whenever a science teacher tries
to define what is peculiarly distinct about science, he or she
has to refer to nonscientific kind of discourse as an example by
way of contrast that will allow students to see what pure
scientific method is about.

So, no, there's no reason not to mention
nonscientific discourse when you're teaching science so that your
students can come to more clarity as to just what is distinct
about science. So that would be a nice opportunity for a teacher
to do that.

Q. Well, I wasn't talking about scientific
discourse, I was talking about the book. Would the fact that the
Creator was mentioned in Darwin's Origin of Species, would that
cause you to remove the book from the classroom?

Q. Going back to Darwin's Black Box by Professor
Behe, you actually provide that book to your students in your
religion and science class, do you not?

A. Yes, I've had my students read either excerpts
from it or essays by Behe that recapitulate the main argument of
the book, yes.

Q. Okay. And you have stated publicly, and I
quote, I make sure my students become familiar with its arguments
and suspect that discussion of it has enriched many science and
religion courses in the last few years. Do you remember making
that statement, public statement?

A. Yes. It helps by way of contrast, once again,
to be able to focus on what is good science and what is not good
science.

Q. So referring to Darwin's Black Box, regardless
of whether you believe in the theory or not, enriches students'
understanding. Correct?

A. Yes. I'm talking about a theology class, not a
science class. In a theology class, we talk about a lot of things
that you don't necessarily focus on in science class.

Q. But there are a lot of different books you
could use to do that. You don't have to use Darwin's Black Box to
do that. Correct?

Q. Until when? Now, you had three definitions of
religion in your reports. Could you give me the first one again?
And I'm not trying to test your memory. Do you have a copy of
your report in front of you, your
expert report?

A. I can tell you. In the broadest sense, Paul
Tillich, for example, says we can understand religion as devotion
to whatever you consider to be of ultimate concern, and that can
be anything. It can even be science, for example. There are some
scientists who make science their ultimate, and that's religion
in a very broad sense of the term.

A. Scientism is the belief that science is the
only valid way to truth, yes.

Q. Now, under that definition, would atheism be
considered a religion?

A. Not atheism as such, but probably every atheist
has something that functions as an ultimate -- for example,
materialism is a form of atheism in which matter constitutes the
ultimate foundation and ground of all being.

Q. Well, could you give me your definition of
atheism? I should have asked that first. What is your definition
of atheism?

A. An atheist is someone who denies the existence
of the God of theism.

Q. And that would have some impact on that
person's world-view, would it not?

Q. And that was one of the aspects that you talked
about in this general definition of religion, you know,
world-view kind of definition?

A. Well, I don't know whether I would call atheism
a world-view. No, it's not -- it's a negative term. It's a denial
of a world-view. But in itself, atheism has to espouse some other
ultimate for it to be a world-view. But in itself, the word
"atheist" is simply a negative term. It's a denial of theism.

Q. If I don't believe in a God, if I don't believe
in God as an all powerful being, then that could impact all kinds
of decisions that I make, moral decisions, family decisions?

A. I would say that fundamentally it is, yes. It's
in search of or it presumes a certain ultimate, namely an
intelligent designer, and it has a whole set of ideas and a kind
of quasi-theology to support that idea.

I would say, to be more precise, intelligent
design is closer to what I would call theology than religion
because intelligent design is a conceptual attempt to clarify the
ultimate that's spontaneously believed in by a particular kind of
religion.

Q. And just to put it in context, I was asking you
about certain characteristics of what a religion would be in the
previous pages. And if you want to, you can read, you know, the
pages before 181. And then I was about to ask a question of you
and I said, If you, and then you responded spontaneously. Would
you read that out loud?

A. (Reading:) Incidentally, I don't characterize
-- I never have characterized the intelligent design movement as
a religion. All I've said is that the appeal to the notion of
intelligent design is nonscientific and religious in nature. And
that was the reason for my qualification. It's more theological
than religious.

A. Religion is the spontaneous and some
philosophers would say the naive pre-reflective involvement of
people in a life committed to certain ultimates but not reflected
upon.

Theology is a theoretical reflection upon what
goes on in religion, and theology usually uses philosophical
concepts in its attempt to articulate in a theoretical level
what's going on in religion. That's why intelligent design is
more theological than religious.

A. Yes, especially as a result of his exposure to
the philosopher
Baruch Spinoza, who was a pantheist and who
believed that the universe is eternal and necessary. And Einstein
was very attracted to Spinoza's thoughts since he was a young
man.

A. Fred Hoyle was a British physicist who proposed
what he thought to be the only conceivable alternative to the big
bang hypothesis, and that was the hypothesis of a steady state,
according to which the universe is eternal, but you can explain
its expansion by virtue of the introduction of new hydrogen atoms
in a certain unverifiable, undetectable way throughout the
history of the universe, and that's how he explained the
expansion of the universe.

THE COURT: Let me just stop you for a second.
We've been at it here for quite some time. If you think that
you're -- and I don't want to cut off your question by any means,
but if you think you're close to being finished, we can stay
here. Otherwise, our reporter has been at it for some time, I
would like to take a break.

MR. THOMPSON: Your Honor, it's probably more
prudent to take a break. I'm not sure how long I'm going to go.
It depends on the witness.

THE COURT: All right. Let's take a relatively
brief break, let's say no more than 15 minutes we'll break for.
And we'll reconvene, and Mr. Wilcox, of course, may have some
redirect at that point, as well. So we'll be in recess.